


your heart is a river that flows from your chest

by sleeplessmiles



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Gen, Pre-Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-21
Updated: 2015-08-21
Packaged: 2018-04-16 10:59:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4622805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sleeplessmiles/pseuds/sleeplessmiles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A few nights before Jemma leaves for Hydra, May finds her sitting alone in the wreckage of the Bus.</p>
            </blockquote>





	your heart is a river that flows from your chest

**Author's Note:**

> Another repost from my tumblr. Hope you like it!!

 

 

It’s a rare day when Melinda May is able to go to bed before midnight. This is not one of those days.

After wandering the empty hallways of the base for some time, seeing nothing amiss and yet unable to quiet the roiling unease in her stomach, she happens upon Trip. He’s in the kitchen, staring into space with a distant frown on his face, but he immediately relaxes when he sees May. He even manages to muster a bit of a smile in greeting.

‘Looking for Jemma?’ he asks.

Is she? May doesn’t think she’s looking for Jemma specifically, so much as whoever has strayed the furthest on this night. All of the kids are wayward now; stumbling and searching in the dark to find what they’re missing, trying desperately to reclaim their certainty.

But she isn’t really sure how to articulate that, so she simply nods in reply. Trip leans back against the counter, looking startlingly dejected.

‘Wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you. She took a beer and headed for the Bus about an hour ago.’

May swallows thickly. Jemma’s been avoiding the Bus like the plague ever since they arrived here.

‘You’re waiting up?’ she asks instead.

Trip shrugs. ‘Someone’s gotta do it.’

‘I can take it from here. Get some rest.’

He hesitates for a moment, unsure, and May feels a now-familiar rush of gratitude for the man. Trip had been just as shattered by the Hydra revelations, by the terrible aftermath, but he’s holding it together so that he can help patch up the pieces of this broken team. She isn’t sure she’ll ever be able to repay him.

Eventually, he nods and pushes himself upright.

‘Want me to cover Skye’s session in the morning?’

She shakes her head, mouth in an approximation of a smile. ‘No. I’ll do it.’

Bidding him goodnight, May heads for the Bus and readies herself for whichever version of Jemma she’ll be seeing tonight. The girl’s been sleeping less and less, craving solace in empty times and spaces where the nightmares can no longer find her. At some point, the morning ray of sunshine had become a reluctant creature of the night; seeking out its shadowed embrace to hide her cracks and fissures from the world, yet resenting herself for it.

But the darkness doesn’t help – this, May knows. It only makes the fissures seem greater, more insurmountable than before.

She steps quietly around the debris of the fractured plane, footfalls sure, thinking of war and running and things broken yet not quite gone forever. Not quite irreparable. It takes her a while to search the entirety of Bus, because she isn’t exactly sure where Jemma would go.

(But that’s a lie, isn’t it? She knows exactly where Jemma will be. She only wishes to delay the inevitable, to keep it as horrible hunch instead of gutwrenching fact.)

She finds Jemma in the one place she’d hoped she wouldn’t – outside the med pod, sitting on the ground opposite the gaping chasm that had sealed her fate that day.

The beer sits next to her, untouched.

‘This is where he stood, you know,’ she tells May without looking across, as though she’s simply reciting facts. Her voice is dull and lifeless. ‘Right where I’m sitting. Looked me directly in the eye.’

May doesn’t need to ask to know who ‘he’ is. With a twist of her lips, she slowly lowers herself to the floor beside the girl, taking great care to not jostle her at all. Jemma’s all tempered fragility these days – she could shatter at the slightest touch, but she’ll only return the next day, all patched up and hardened in a way she hadn’t been before.

(Everything is scar tissue, now.)

‘I never saw it before that moment – that he’d been lying, I mean. Not until I saw what the ugly truth looked like on his face.’

Jemma shakes her head to herself, trapped in the ethereal nightmare of a memory, and her eyes are welling up but she barely notices now. Hasn’t noticed for quite some time.

‘Fitz…  _begged_ ,’ she almost rasps. ‘And now he won’t even…’ She blinks rapidly at the ceiling, lips taut with barely concealed restraint. May feels practically nauseated at the sight.

‘I can’t lie?’ is what Jemma says, voice tragically small and so achingly  _young_. There are tears rolling down her cheeks, an unending stream, and yet she doesn’t make a sound. Someone with the passion that this girl possesses, with the endless heartbreak to which she’s been subjected… this isn’t how it should happen. She should be exploding. Instead, she breaks noiselessly; collapsing inwards on herself like a dying star.

It’s tragically familiar.

Jemma turns her head to look at May, the action abrupt and almost wild, and her face is bleeding desperation.

‘I can’t lie to him, May.’

May’s heart clenches at the realisation that of all the atrocities Jemma is about to face, of all the parts of herself she is about to put at risk, she’s most concerned about the perceived betrayal of Fitz. It shouldn’t surprise her anymore, the lengths to which this girl will go in order to protect her loved ones, and yet it still manages to catch May off-guard.

But the tragic truth of the situation is that Jemma can lie. She lies all the time without even realising it – to Fitz, to the rest of them, but most of all to  _herself_. She’ll say anything she can, do anything within her power, to minimise the damage she inflicts upon the rest of them, and that means keeping the turmoil within her tightly reined in.

She’s been lying successfully for months.

May won’t ever tell her that, though, especially not now. To do so would be a betrayal in and of itself. This is one of the cracks the girl had been hoping to hide, seeking out the cover of night like a desperate thing, but the flickering fluorescent lighting exposes it in all its ugliness. May won’t draw unnecessary attention to it.

‘There’s nowhere else for me to go,’ Jemma whispers finally, heartbreakingly, and it feels as though the girl is uttering the only real truth she knows. May gets it. You can be trapped in more ways than one, and Jemma’s had to learn this terrible truth in the most difficult way imaginable.

May resists the urge to reach out and squeeze her knee. It wouldn’t do any good now, anyway.

She knows what Jemma needs to hear.

‘Nowhere but up to the surface,’ she murmurs simply.

Jemma’s startled gaze meets May’s then, her eyes glistening with the multitudes of her collapse – it’s star debris, littered across her face. May swallows, but she won’t look away. She can’t.

She needs Jemma to know that her intentions with this departure, this terrifying foray into enemy territory, are not being misunderstood.

Of course May doesn’t want her to leave –  _of course_  she doesn’t – and she would gladly face down Hydra a hundred times over if it meant Jemma Simmons would be spared from entering the lion’s den. If it meant that Jemma could avoid tainting herself with that which she cannot ever remove.

But she  _understands_. And she respects it more than words could ever convey.

After a long moment, during which she searches May’s face for any hint of falsehood, Jemma purses her lips together and looks away. Her eyes are drawn inevitably back to the negative space left by the medical pod. It’s a gutting sight, and May can’t help but think of the negative space that will be left by Jemma’s exit.

She wonders if Jemma thinks of that too. She wonders if Jemma sees all the negative spaces that follow them around these days, if they haunt her as much they haunt May.

(She’s almost certain that she does. That they do.)

‘I won’t let them catch me out,’ Jemma vows suddenly, almost to herself, and May understands this for what it is; her moment of doubt, of naked despair, is over. She’s setting up the barricades again, steeling herself for battle.

She looks to May, tears streaking her cheeks like warpaint, and her gaze is  _ferocious_.

‘They won’t get through me to any of you.’

It’s a long time before May answers.

‘I know.’

(Because she does know. She  _does_.

And there’s nothing in Melinda May’s world that terrifies her more.)

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the Death Cab For Cutie song 'Lightness,' which I love a lot. Thanks so much for reading!!


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